Calenture I / II

The study was undertaken under the auspices of Land Use Poetics an inter-national/disciplinary network of arts researchers enquiring into methods of spatial projection/technologies and imaginaries of land use. Making/exhibiting work within the condensed time frame of four days, Lee’s interest lay in literalising this ‘brief encounter’ so as to engender a ‘corporeal situation’ (rather than attaining a cognitive position). In Malmo/Lund Lee ‘immersed’ herself in the ‘landscape’ that was her object of study, climbing, with her eyes closed, to the top diving board of a local swimming pool and jumping ‘blind’ into the water below; recasting/gendering the transcendent impulse of Klein’s iconic leap. The resulting video records the optical disruption caused to the gridded pattern of the pool’s tiled floor by the impact of her body hitting the water. In Thanet the submersion and revelation of a tidal swimming pool by the turning tide, disrupting the clean, square lines of its concrete frame, was recorded over a 2-hour period. As described in Lee’s accompanying text/image work ‘Entering the Field’ (Land Use Poetics, Lund: 2011, ISBN: 978-91-576-9011-1) both videos articulate a set of tensions, between the ordering/containing affinities of the grid/square, a key ideological/structural device within Modernist spatial thought and the plenitude of the field (or its watery equivalent).